eBay appears to block third-party AI agents like Meta’s Muse

In short: eBay appears to be stopping some third-party AI agents, including Meta’s Muse, from browsing and collecting listing details.

What's going on

A reader told The Verge that he had been using Meta’s Muse, an AI agent (a helper program that can take steps for you, like searching and sorting), to browse eBay and create a daily list of watches for sale. The list included links, prices, shipping details, and notes about condition and style. Over the weekend, Muse stopped working on eBay and said it was blocked.

The Verge says it was able to repeat the problem with other searches. In some cases, Muse pointed users to other websites that copy eBay listings, instead of linking to eBay directly.

This fits a wider pattern. Retailers often block outside AI agents from shopping sites, even while adding their own AI features. eBay previously updated its user agreement to ban tools like “buy-for-me agents” and “LLM-driven bots” that place orders without human review. Until recently, agents like Muse still seemed able to browse and pull listings.

An eBay spokesperson told The Verge that eBay takes a “selective approach” to third parties. The company said it has restricted access in some cases, including “unauthorized scraping” and training on eBay data (scraping is like sending a robot to quickly copy lots of pages at once). eBay did not directly say whether it recently changed rules that would block Muse. Meta declined to comment.

What to watch

If more shopping sites tighten access, AI agents may be limited to stores that officially partner with them. For shoppers, that could mean these tools work more like a guided assistant in a few places, rather than a universal helper that can browse anywhere on the web.

Source: The Verge AI